


The Cabin

by xathira



Series: Prince of the Unknown [15]
Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Beast Wirt, I don't know how to tag this - don't be a coward just read it, Lies, Other, Prince!Wirt AU, Secrets, split POV, who proofreads?? not me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:06:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22132252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xathira/pseuds/xathira
Summary: While waiting for her father to come home, Anna befriends two brothers.  One is a ball of energy... the other is a beast.
Series: Prince of the Unknown [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1516961
Comments: 55
Kudos: 172





	1. 🙞A Game🙜

The contest starts with the young Beast facing the Woodsman under the creamy glow of the moon, dressed in the same dismal darkness as his vile predecessor. The antlered devil speaks in a tone so measured and cool that the Woodsman grinds his teeth in rage, rib cage heaving and veins throbbing in his neck.

“The first Beast fooled you twice,” says the fledgling monster matter-of-factly. “The _second_ lie he told you was that your daughter’s soul burned in that lantern, and you believed him.”

“You’re not getting it back,” the Woodsman snarls. Spit flecks his lips. His eyes bulge like a mad dog’s, and he shakes like a mad dog, too. One hand grips his axe so tight his knuckles pop; the other whisks the Dark Lantern protectively behind him. “I won’t give you the power to do as you please, harvesting souls without restraint—you will _starve,_ Beast, and be grateful!”

Triple-hued eyes narrow into rainbow scimitars. Their scalding light is the only thing that cuts through the oppressive blackness; the moon hovers above the forest like a pearly boat on a bottomless sea, skimming that shadow but doing nothing to relieve it.

The young Beast drops his voice lower. Syllables resonate through the trees and surround the Woodsman in a treacherous snare. “The _first_ lie,” he murmurs, “was that your daughter was dead to begin with.” A whisper of wind-through-leaves, insects-in-grass, creatures-in-dirt sussurates beneath the cadence of his velvet tenor. “Why so easily duped, O Woeful Lantern-Bearer? Why didn’t you check yo͔u̖r͚ ͎ _o̥w͚ṇ ̲h͓o̯m̻e̫?_ ”

The old man howls a mournful cry that seems to tear itself from the center of his heart. He is a pitiful husk, everything good and whole about him scraped out long ago. “Shut up. Shut _up,_ you vicious, cunning bastard!”

“I̓ ̏k͋n͋ów͋ ͑ä ́s̚ecret, Woodsman.” The serrated shadows whirl—scatter—reform behind the elder, claws stretching greedily toward the lantern. Laughter devoid of empathy knocks between the Woodsman’s ears as he careens backward and slashes out wildly with his blade. 

“Do not… speak to me… about _her._ You have no right to mention her, evil spawn that you are…”

“A charming log cabin settled in the Unknown. A young girl with brown hair, kind eyes… Anna. How would I know her name, unless she lives and _I saw her?_ ”

“Stop,” sobs the Woodsman. “Rotten, mangy liar. I don’t believe you. I don’t…”

“I propose a deal. Ä ͐ǧa̿m̎e͌,͑ ̎r͑ėa͗l̛l̄y.͛” What used to be a hapless lad tilts his head at the old man. Mocking. “If you can reach your home before I do, you will find your daughter alive: safe and unharmed. She does wait for you, you know, each and every day. B͍̱̯u̠̣̹t̢͚̣ ̢̪̣i͖͕̱f̜̜̹ ̦͙͜I̯̪̱ ̤͖͓g̠͓͕e̤̤̳t̢̟̲ ̭̖̜t̬͈̬h͚̫̝ę̭͈ŗ̨̤e̳̪̳ ̨͔͚f̩̗̹i̟̲̯r̲̣̮s̩̰̟t̟͙̠…”

Edelwood roots crackle from the soil to whip against the Woodsman’s legs; he moans and gibbers in fear, chopping erratically, grief poisoning his reason. 

“I’ll add her to my forest,” The Beast jeers. “Another soul you couldn’t save. Another lost soul to fuel my flame.”


	2. 🙞Anna Meets The Boys🙜

Months ago, Anna wandered too far into the Unknown alone and met The Beast. She survived. Her father went looking for her, fearing the worst, and the two missed each other like stones thrown in opposite directions. Anna returned home. She waited for her father… and waited… 

_When loved ones fear you lost stay found… by steeling, still, on solid ground._

This is the mantra that keeps Anna trapped inside her own house, chained by a fading, dying hope: the hope that her father will come back. 

_Tonight,_ she tells herself, waiting on the porch until her candle burns out. _This morning,_ she thinks, making enough breakfast for two—just in case. She reads the list that she’s written on paper torn from a wasp-nest, scanning words until the letters jostle together, rules that cut the dragging days into smaller manageable segments. Chores to keep her busy. Rituals to keep her safe. Anna is bored, and _unbearably_ lonely, but she cannot risk another encounter with The Beast by plunging into the woods on a solo rescue mission.

So Anna makes windchimes out of the crockery she’s smashed in frustration, hoping her father can hear the tinkling music of shattered tea cups and plates and know that someone’s waiting for him; she remembers to keep at least one candle lit in the window for him, so he doesn’t mistake the cabin as abandoned. Half a year passes… the cruelest winter she can remember buries Anna’s home in heaps of snow and panes of ice, but she doesn’t starve, and when spring gradually pushes green and fresh from the heavy mantles of white she fans her hope anew.

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

A detailed map weighed down by a rock flutters beside her while Anna glares through her telescope on the roof, which is still a little damp from the past day’s rain. She’s no cartographer, but she’s drawn a fairly faithful representation of the forest around her property by searching through this instrument almost every day. Early morning explains her nightdress and wool stockings and the breakfast tea she’s perched on her windowsill, and why her long brown hair is a tumbleweed.

“Blue jay nest. Grazing doe. New patch of _amanita muscaria…_ hmm?”

Person-typical movement has her swiveling the telescope in a new direction. Her heart rate jumps up. 

She sees the little boy first; he’s dressed in a hooded cloak and galoshes and splashing across puddles in a messy game of hopscotch. He can’t be more than six or seven years old. When he tips his face up to catch the dawn sun on his face, Anna sees the apples of his cheeks gathered into an enormous smile. 

“What are you doing out there by yourself?” Her fingers tighten on her telescope. He’s galavanting beyond the arbitrary line of safety she’s etched around her homestead, but Anna has breached that perimeter before when she thought strangers were in peril. This is a _little boy._ Surely he isn’t alone, out there, where The Beast prowls and anything can happen...

The joyful lad suddenly turns around, waving to encourage an unseen someone behind him to catch up. A small dose of relief soothes the worry in Anna’s heartstrings. Good: he isn’t alone. Probably not lost, either. As usual Anna overreacted, starved for any reason to throw herself headlong into a social interaction—

A tall shadow lurches from the trees, dragging blackness behind it like an obsidian cape. A crown of antlers grows jaggedly from its head. The twin lanterns of its eyes smolder amber-yellow in the dim twilight that swaths its terrible form and it stares, transfixed, upon the helpless child. 

Anna’s heart tangles itself in horror. She pants out several small, stunted screams, fighting to suck enough air into a chest compacted by dread. “The Beast,” she squeaks. “I have to warn him—I have to—”

Breathing too fast, too shallow, Anna scrabbles backward through her bedroom window and sprints downstairs. She shoves her feet into the wrong boots, twisting her toes into the poorly fitting curvature of the soles, and doesn’t bother lacing them up as she flies down the porch steps and across the front lawn. Maybe she can shout for the boy’s attention, tell him to run into the safety of her cabin where The Beast can’t reach him indoors; maybe she can distract The Beast long enough for the boy to crawl for shelter in a log or between some roots, hidden from the monster. Could she be lucky enough to make contact with the forest-dwelling demon and survive a second time? Would it be worth never seeing her father again if she manages to rescue an innocent soul? 

“I think I see the log cabin over there, Wirt. We’re almost there!”

Anna swipes up a long stick almost as thick as her wrist from the mud without stopping. She zips through the woods, following the sound of the kid’s voice and the garish glow of The Beast’s eyes. Panicked and _knowing_ she’s being an idiot and despairing her own demise Anna grinds her heels into the slick earth yards ahead of the child—astonishing him into wide-eyed silence—

“St-stay back, Beast!” she cheeps, brandishing her stick. Her voice cracks, and that snaps the little boy out of his surprise. He turns his back foolishly on the living hopelessness lurking over his shoulder.

“I think you got the wrong idea, lady. Where’d you come from, wearin’ your jammies?” 

“Get b-behind me,” Anna stammers. It must be her nerves, but she could have _sworn_ that The Beast looked… different, last she saw him. 

“Greg,” The Beast murmurs, not breaking its predatory eye contact with her. “There were some blueberry bushes back there a few yards… why don’t you go pick some for us?”

“Right away, Sir!” The boy—Greg—salutes and skips cheerfully into the woods, singing a blueberry tune that sounds made-up on the spot.

“What do you want with that child?” Anna swallows, but the motion gets clogged at the base of her throat, unable to continue its way to her stomach. She doesn’t put her stick down. “It isn’t blueberry season...”

Those citrine eyes shutter into half-moons, upper lids sliding downward in weariness or irritation. “And I’m not the Beast you think I am.”

Darkness draws back from The Beast like a velour curtain. Anna gawks at an exhausted teenage boy with ink-colored antlers jutting from his poorly chopped brown hair… thorny ankles poking below the tattered hems of his pants, from which extend wood-carved hooves like those of her goats… sleeves rolled up to his sharpened elbows, forearms plated in onyx bark… one of his clawed hands presses _hard_ into his left shoulder, from which impossibly black liquid seeps slowly down his chest to stick the fabric against his skin.

“Y-you’re bleeding!” Anna gasps. “I didn’t know The Beast could bleed…”

Yet she _does_ know that The Beast’s eyes aren’t dull-yellow, and he has never shucked the shade that obscures his true form, and he never speaks in a young man’s weary tone—The Beast she fears ISN’T a young man at all! She’s seen the real Beast with her own two eyes, and Anna has absolutely no idea what _this_ creature is, but he isn’t the same one that lurks in her nightmares.

So… what on earth _is_ this person?

“Do you live in that cabin?” The monster-boy asks impatiently. He acts as if each word is a physical weight he must heft from the ground. 

“Yes,” Anna answers, suspicion making her cautious. That child might trust this devil… but children are quick to trust, and devils quick to deceive. “Why should that concern you?”

The monster-boy visibly relaxes. He wears a necklace made of twine and ivory beads, which knock quietly together as his posture sags. “Please,” he whispers, “can my b-brother stay the night with you? He n-needs somewhere safe to sleep, a _real_ bed…”

Surprise tug Anna’s eyebrows toward her hairline and makes her grip falter on her bludgeoning weapon. She grew up in the Unknown; she’s known a boy whose family was transformed into animals, has conversed with her mother’s ghost from the other side of a mirror, and strayed close enough to the true Beast to have smelled the feral musk that trailed in his frightful wake. Sure, she has chosen to imprison herself in her cabin for almost a year… but Anna isn’t sheltered. This monster-boy having a brother shouldn’t shock her like it does.

Hmm… maybe they’re adoptive brothers? Or the eldest is cursed somehow?

When the bleeding young man doesn’t ask anything for himself, only pleading at her wordlessly with his whiskey-glass eyes, Anna chews her bottom lip. “That’s all you want? Shelter for your brother?”

“His name is Greg,” the monster-boy answers quickly, eagerly, jumping on the chance Anna hasn’t quite offered. He winces, talons squeezing on his wounded shoulder, and takes a single step closer. “If y-you can lend him a bed, clothes if you have them, I’ll—I’ll provide food. I can f-forage, more than you’d ever need—”

“Sir Wirt! Lookit all the blueberries I found!”

A crashing sound and jubilant shout has the monster-boy yelping and shading himself in darkness once again. Anna blinks and rubs her eyes, trying to adjust to the abrupt, person-shaped nightfall.

Greg trots into their meeting holding the hem of his cloak to form a sling in front of him. His pudgy fingers and mouth are stained vibrantly purple, no doubt from what must be a _gallon_ of blue-black berries rolling around his makeshift apron. “Can you believe it?!” he enthuses. “There musta been a MILLION of them on those bushes! We’ll have to go back later and get s’more! We could make blueberry pancakes, blueberry waffles, blueberry pie, blueberry ice cream…”

He continues listing off blueberry concoctions while Anna turns to stare wonderingly at this Beast who is not The Beast. Or rather, not The Beast _she_ remembers. She taps her stick against the dirt, contemplating how this will come back to bite her later. “If I take him in… are you coming in too?”

The monster-boy—Wirt? What kind of a name is _Wirt_ —pulls what she interprets as a tender gaze away from his younger sibling (if they actually _are_ siblings, that is). “N-no. I won’t. I can st-stay outside. I only want to m-m-make sure Greg’s taken care of.”

“Who’s going to take care of you?” counters Anna lowly. She eyes the angle of nothingness where the not-Beast is injured… she couldn’t tell how badly he’d been hurt with his hand blocking the damage, but there’d been so much _blood..._ or whatever that awful pitch-liquid is. If the monster-boy is indeed bleeding, and if he’s anything like a mortal boy… he must not have much time left. 

“Wirt is a big boy, he can take care of himself,” Greg asserts, marching closer to bump his shoulder amiably against his older brother’s hip. He doesn’t notice the pained grunt that Wirt tries to muffle against his wrist. “He’s a forest spirit, so he sleeps outside with the animals. It’s a whole thing.”

“I will be _fine,_ ” Wirt insists before Anna can argue. “Since I’m _not hurt whatsoever,_ and I’m a powerful forest spirit…” He flippantly waves the claws not currently clamped over his collar bone. “I’ll be gr-great. And even if I _were_ horribly injured—which I am not—I would heal f-far too quickly for it to matter.”

“That’s a weird thing to bring up,” Greg chirps. He beams at Anna. “Hi! My name’s Greg. Do you live in the log cabin we’ve been hiking to for hours and hours?”

Anna faces Wirt. His eyes smolder at her, warningly. She forces a smile. “Y-yes, I do. I hear you’re looking for lodging?” Greg bobs his head affirmatively. “Well, fortunate traveler, it just so happens that I’ve more than enough room, and greatly look forward to your most welcome company. In exchange for food, of course, as your brother proposed.”

“Oh man, Wirt can hook you up,” Greg tells her surreptitiously. “Let’s go in! I gotta rest these leg o’ mine.”

Wirt, who doesn’t appear miffed at Anna’s shrewdness (he doesn’t appear like anything, really, painted by shadows as he is) dips his head at her deferentially. “Sorry to impose. Your graciousness will not go unrewarded.”

Despite Wirt’s gentle manners, despite Greg’s chipper lack of concern, Anna feels that she will come to regret sheltering the strange Beast’s brother. That’s the thing about good deeds…

They don’t go unpunished.


	3. 🙞Company🙜

For someone who’s older brother is _an actual demon,_ Greg is exceedingly optimistic.

He follows Anna into the cabin as if he’s lived there for ages, tossing his sopping wet cloak on a nearby chair and kicking off his muddy boots to wander in his socks. Anna leads him on a short tour—too addled to accomplish much else—and sets him up in a room her parents had used as a study. Greg thanks her politely and hopefully asks if she has any good picture books to read.

“Er… probably,” replies Anna with glib eloquence. _There’s a monster-boy outside and this is his utterly normal little brother and I’m supposed to act like a hospitable innkeeper for… how long, exactly!?_ “Your brother mentioned staying the _night._ Am I to understand that you only require shelter _this_ particular evening?”

“I dunno,” Greg shrugs. “He said he’ll know that it’s time to go when it’s time to go.”

Anna’s stomach knots. This lad is absolutely adorable… but Wirt? The outright threatening _creature_ who closely resembles The Beast, and yet is not The Beast? What sort of sick, demented game is _he_ playing?

And is Greg a victim, or the bait?

“Did you know that the first log cabin was made out of toothpicks and built by mice?” The kid asks her out of nowhere. “And that all the animals tried to copy them until we got to people, and the people had to use logs to make a big enough house?”

Anna catches herself staring out the window, fruitlessly searching for antlers and yellow firefly eyes. “Wh-what?”

“It’s a rock fact, so it isn’t true,” Greg reassures her. “Now how about them picture books?”

There’s a stack of colorful stories that Anna enjoyed when she was small hidden under her bed and in the attic. She gathers them all for Greg, still operating through a numb fog of shock, and barely smiles when Greg unexpectedly throws himself at her in a delighted hug. The contact is… lovely. Comforting. Anna wants to hug him back, but Greg’s innocence only serves to throw his brother’s mystery into starker, more disturbing relief, and she cannot tear away from the creeping foreboding that this is all an elaborate trap.

Greg brings the books outside where Wirt hovers like an inkblot scarecrow. While Anna begins her chores for the day, she observes the not-Beast turn pages and take turns reading with Greg on the stoop, using awkward character voices when he thinks Anna isn’t listening.

In the afternoon, after Greg trades picture books for playing with the goats and geese, Wirt steals into the forest and Anna anxiously avoids him. She anticipates the creature leaping out at her every time she turns a corner outdoors; the unsuspecting animals pick up on her broadcasted tension and eye her warily, as if _Anna_ is the problem. When the sun starts to set and Anna remains alive and un-attacked, her nerves maintain their high alert. 

“ _I’m_ not the one who wants to eat you alive,” she grouses at the chickens as she shuts them into their coop for the night. The hens cluck at her reproachfully and settle into their roosts. “Mother and Father taught me better than to trust strangers. I’ll probably wake up tomorrow with my own viscera staining my bedsheets, and all your ungrateful feathers scattered like so many leaves in the run!”

The rooster burbles at her, unimpressed. Anna thumbs her nose at him and marches off into the dusk for the rest of her nonhuman charges. 

Last to be put away are the goats. For some reason they’re all bedded down at the far corner of their pen; Anna worries that one of them is sick or injured and jogs briskly forward to check when she notices the flowering branch twining up from their midst like a sapling.

She stumbles to a stop. That’s one of the monster-boy’s antlers, decked in taffeta-soft springtime blossoms. 

“Excuse me?” Anna calls, her voice squawking higher than she intended. The antler-branch doesn’t move, but under the inquisitive bleating of goats she hears a muffled snore. “Um… Wirt? Are you sleeping with the goats tonight?”

Damnable curiosity eggs her on. She sidles up to the goats… peeks into the space they’ve created with their closely-pressed bodies, where the monster-boy nestles…

Her horrified inhale stirs him from his rest. Wirt yowls and reflexively attempts to push himself upright, fails, and hisses in pain—startling the goats away from him. In the next instant he’s a featureless shadow. “Wha—what’s going on? Is Greg okay?”

“Y-your shoulder,” Anna gasps. The agitated goats jostle around her, butting against her legs and nibbling at the shade-obscured fabric of the monster-boy’s shirt. “You need bandages, stitches, _something!_ ”

His squash-yellow eyes level at her. “No I don’t.”

_I am arguing with an Eldritch abomination that bleeds BLACK!_ Her naturally altruistic spirit wars with common sense and an electric spark of fear. “Yes, you do! What happened—did someone try to take your whole arm off?!”

He flinches. “I think he was going for my head, actually…”

Anna believes him. A trench has been split into the creature’s shoulder, at the junction between neck and arm; she guesses that whatever hit him—an axe, most likely, or a machete, or a butcher’s cleaver—slammed to a stop at his clavicle, maybe even breaking the bone on its way to his upper ribs. It was hard to tell in her brief glance at the wound exactly where it ends… the whole thing is crusted over with glossy onyx: a scab the size and texture of fungus rippling over a log.

Major arteries and veins run just inferior to the collar bone. This injury should have killed him.

“The boy you call your little brother… he doesn’t know, does he?” The baby goat that Anna loves best nonchalantly lips her fingertips, unconcerned that a corrupted forest beast is dripping his polluted blood into a dark puddle in the pen. A nanny goat nuzzles maternally into the monster-boy’s unhurt shoulder.

Those sulfurous eyes diverge into concentric rings of blue, yellow, and pink. “He doesn’t know,” the creature-that-is-Wirt affirms. “And you won’t tell him, will you?”

Anna trembles. One of the goats belts out a loud, accusing _meh-h-h_ and knocks a horn against the back of her knee. “N-no…? I suppose… if you wish to keep a secret… I shall respect your wish.”

“Is he inside?”

“Reading the rest of the picture books, last I checked.”

“Is the goat pen visible from the cabin?”

“Not this corner, no.”

Wirt sighs, and as he does his protective layer of night slips back under the natural shadow cast by himself, Anna, and the goats. Anna’s focus cannot help but fixate upon his grievous, should-be mortal wound… and at the necklace looped around his neck, whose eggshell-white beads skim the edges of the repellent cicatrix. Her scalp and spine prickle at the same time goosebumps skitter along her arms. It’s hard to form words with her dry mouth. “Beg pardon… are those…”

“Teeth?” The monster-boy taps his necklace as if he just remembered it and then rolls a large, polished molar in his talons. “Y-yeah. Yeah, they are.”

“Oh. Interesting.” As Anna speed-walks away, head held high despite her galloping pulse and the plaintive moaning of the goats, she refuses to so much as glance back when Wirt vows timorously that they’re not _human_ teeth; whatever his talisman is made of, Anna wants to be as _far_ away from it as fast as possible.

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

“ _Where gentler animals make their bed, so too is safe to rest your head._ ”

Anna does not wake up to her intestines tangled outside her own body, or to any missing teeth (she checked, probing the far corners of her mouth with her index finger). Birds warble merrily outside her open bedroom window. Brisk petrichor seeps deliciously into her room so that each breath is scented with fallen rain and turned earth, and the sunlight that kisses her eyelids is clear as a glass of water.

It’s entirely too gorgeous a morning considering what hideous demon presumably slept in the goat pen last night. 

She tiptoes vigilantly downstairs, scratching through her rumpled bedhead and uncomfortably attuned to the clang of pots and pans crashing from the kitchen. Her mother’s rhymes, all meant as lessons, are murmured like a spell—magic words to protect her from danger. In one hand she squeezes her mother’s favorite hunting knife. It won’t do much against Wirt, if that stomach-turning shoulder-gash is anything to judge by, but Anna only needs to startle him enough to flee if she needs to.

“ _Trust shy rabbits, fowl, and deer; if they gather—‘tis safer here._ ”

A child’s flutey, off-key singing accompanies the racket of dishes. Anna momentarily mashes her lips shut to pay attention to the lyrics. 

“I make pancakes, yes I do, I want pancakes, how ‘bout you?” The unmistakable sound of a skillet hitting the floor is followed by helpless giggles. “Oh, whoops, butterfingers!”

“Be careful, Greg, this isn’t our house!”

And Anna is back to standing-on guard. She slowly steps off the final stair and tiptoes into the kitchen, knife hidden behind her back. Greg has gathered flour, a pitcher of milk, some eggs, and a bowl of his blueberries onto the table while Wirt’s silhouette looks on and fidgets from an open window, antlers preventing him from leaning all the way in. The light of his eyes is closer to buttercup than whiskey today.

“S-sorry about this, we wanted to surprise you with breakfast…” Wirt indicates the mess on the table with his claw—as well as a bushel of other treats tied neatly into bundles with long grass waiting for Anna on the counter. 

“Did you go foraging in my garden?” Anna inquires loftily. Yet when she inspects the bundles herself, she sees a motley of succulent wild plants, nothing that’s she’s cultivated herself. “Oh. You… you didn’t have to…”

“I did,” Wirt demures. “Food for a bed, remember?”

“And what a good bed it was! I slept like a log cabin! Geddit? Because cabins are made of logs, and I slept like a _bunch_ of logs—”

Wirt flicks a blueberry from the window and hits the back of Greg’s head to shut him up. Greg chortles and returns fire, and the scene is so pure and full of simple, unrestrained happiness that Anna can’t help but laugh, too.

Once Anna realizes that Wirt has no plans to harm her, nor any of her animals, she dives into the unexpected morning fiasco with equal abandon. Blueberries fly like bullets back and forth from the window; flour dusts her hair, her clothes; Wirt and Greg trade good-natured insults and playful threats so seamlessly that Anna’s beginning to believe they really _are_ related by blood. 

Anna needs company if she is going to survive her vigil in this empty house and successfully maintain her sanity. She deserves to have fun like any other child her age. If her company is to be a talkative young lad and his visually terrifying older brother… well, beggars can’t be choosers.


	4. 🙞Obstacles🙜

Each breath that the Woodsman rakes into his lungs is steel wool scrubbing the inside of his chest. Every muscle hurts, raw from exertion. A thick copper taste taints his tongue when he swallows. He’s running as fast as he can, frantic, pushing through the rusted-hinge screaming of his joints and the collapse of his lungs, damning the lantern that swings from one fisted hand and despairing that he cannot leave it behind to be free of its clunking weight because he _needs_ this lantern, he cannot afford to show up without it—

Is he too late? Is he running toward the torture of a further-broken heart? Does The Beast mean to break him irreparably, and finally lock his old bones in an Edelwood for good?

The Woodsman curses as he falls for the hundredth time, scrapes his bloody knees for the hundredth time. If this is a game that he’s already lost… then the old man has no idea why he should go on. It is hard enough feeding the wretched creature whose soul is trapped within its prison of glass and metal—the Woodsman cannot, _won’t_ , endure the unbearable pain of losing his daughter again.

His Anna…

The sun sets and rises and sets on his flagging shoulders. He rests in fits, knowing that he must sleep if he is to face down The Beast for his daughter’s life, and yet spurred by the dreadful knowledge that his competition does not sleep at all. Sure, the demon had _said_ that he'd travel on foot just like the Woodsman ("to make it fair, of course") but deception is that monster's forte. The Beast has every advantage. 

When he reaches a familiar part of the Unknown that he used to frequent, his boots scuffing over a dirt path worn by generations of travelers, the Woodsman dares to feel hope. Not far now. He will make it. And if the nefarious Beast cheated and beat him there, the Woodsman will hack at the monster’s neck until he severs its head as he meant to do before, and then he will rescue his Anna from any Edelwood that touches her.

Teeth bared, axe scraping the dirt as he drags it, the Woodsman resolutely marches ahead. The sun rises again to light his path, brilliant in the way the Dark Lantern can never be. Rays of orange and rose smudge the woods like fine chalk pastels…

He halts. A vein worms in his jaw. Incredulous anger steals his breath, buzzes under his skin, roars in his ears. 

A wall of wicked thorns stretches as far as he can see, blocking the road home. Ravens with oil-slicked feathers and beady white-bright stares croak at him from the highest brambles; from the lowest tangles, misshapen foxes with sludge oozing from their black pelts snarl and snap, their eyes carrying the same flame as that of the birds’. They approach the Woodsman and do not hesitate when he hefts his axe.

“Come on then, slaves of The Beast. _You don’t scare me!_ ”

A fox shrieks and leaps at him. The axe arcs across its chest and it shrieks again, higher, as flesh severs and the oil that has replaced its blood splatters thickly to the ground. This is not the first of such accursed things to pursue the Woodsman since he started this game…

The Beast isn’t playing fair. And it might be impossible, ludicrous, _mad,_ but the Woodsman swears that when he faces the young Beast again—regardless if the bastard has Anna or not—the old man will slaughter him like all the corrupted creatures that have crossed his path so far, like the sick conniving animal he is.


	5. 🙞Waiting🙜

Greg jumps into chores the same way most children would a new game. He gathers eggs as if it’s a competition and runs around the goat pen hollering like a loon; he follows Anna to the well to bring bath water and tea water and soup water to the cabin, unable to carry the bucket but entertaining Anna with his nonstop chatter; every morning he brings in the neat bundle of goods that Wirt has foraged, eyes sparkling with excitement: “I wonder what he brought us this time! I hope it’s more potatoes!”

Anna has always mused on what it would be like to have a younger sibling. She’d be less lonesome, obviously… but she’s never imagined it would be this _fun._

Wirt assists Anna with her chores as well. He brings her armfuls of tinder for her fireplace and pulls weeds from her vegetable garden; she hasn’t witnessed him reciting spells or performing rituals, yet her plants all double their size in mere hours of his charcoal outline hovering over them. Anna notes that he uses _both_ arms fairly equally… his shoulder must be healing better than she believed possible.

In the afternoon on day three of hosting the boys, Greg tries to rope Ann into a game called “Beast Tag.” He lifts his splayed-finger hands to his temples—a pantomime of antlers—and growls at her playfully while Wirt groans in agonized humiliation in the background. 

“We are _not_ playing that,” the monster-boy gripes. The geese and chickens bunch around his hooves, pecking and preening. “Anna has chores she has to finish—right, Anna?”

“What are the rules?” Anna asks to Wirt’s consternation. Greg pumps his fists victoriously and explains the game as Wirt utters a disgusted noise and storms off.

Beast Tag occupies the pair for the better part of an hour. Greg isn’t winded whatsoever when Anna begs for a truce; he scampers into the goat pen to spend time with his new best friends while Anna goes looking for Wirt.

She finds The Beast bent over a book, of all things, his back propped up on the outer side of the stone wall that fences her home. He’s doffed his shade—and although his shirt is _ruined,_ much of his tarry scab has been replaced by healed flesh.

“Oh, you brought a novel with you?” She leans over the wall with her elbows tucked at her sides. “What is it?”

Wirt slams the story shut. His ears bloom pink as he frantically attempts to hide the novel by stuffing it into his shirt. “N-n-nothing, nothing, it’s just a book I found in the toolshed I w-wasn’t enjoying it or anything I was just bored so I picked it up _hahaha_ I’ll go put it back!”

He springs upright. Anna snares his collar with reflexes honed by her mother’s many hunting lessons. “Did you… say that you found that in the toolshed?”

“I’m putting it back _aha ha_ I barely even got through the first page I actually sort of hate it—”

“In the wheelbarrow?” Anna continues. “Piled with the other saccharine travesties of its kind?”

Wirt is sweating. “I… wouldn’t call them _saccharine,_ per se… abundantly sentimental, perhaps, but there is an intrinsic value in such naked romantic idealism—”

“Naked _idealism._ Certainly.” She clears her throat, poorly smothering a childish giggle that pushes itself zealfully against her pressed lips. “So, which one is it? _The Seduction of Lady Witworthingtonshire?_ ”

“No, _My Heart Burns There Too,_ ” Wirt corrects her instantly—and gags out a disgraced sound, whirling to clasp his hands imploringly. “Pleasepleaseplease, you cannot tell Greg about this, you cannot tell ANYONE about this, my secret dies with you, I am _begging._ ”

Anna laughs now—uninhibited, gut-busting, rib-aching guffaws that peel over the homestead like the mad cackles of a hyena. Mirthful tears prickle at the corners of her eyes. She shakes, bending over the wall and pounding her fist on the stones. When was the last time she’d laughed this hard? At _anything?_ And meanwhile Wirt whines and whimpers and tugs at his antlers trying to get through to her, petrified that at any moment Greg will come around and ask about the rectangular lump under his button-down.

“I did not pin you for a devotee of penny romance novels, Beast,” Anna wheezes. She wipes moisture from her eyelashes and laughs harder, unable to believe that she had ever been afraid of this soft-hearted covert romantic.

“Okay, it isn’t _that_ hilarious,” Wirt sulks. He scuffs a hoof and starts moping his way toward the toolshed, undoubtedly to toss the incriminating book.

“Can I ask you a question?” Anna straightens her features with herculean effort. She props her chin in her hands and blows a strand of flyaway hair from her nose, watching Wirt’s back for cues. “How do you blush?”

Wirt stops to crane his neck around at her and blinks rapidly, abashed. “Beg pardon?”

“You’re so red. But you bleed black.”

Impossibly, he blushes more, resembling a ripe tomato from the neck up. “It’s a Beast thing,” he grumbles, as if he’s uttered that excuse too many times before. 

And Anna realizes in that moment that as little as she knows about Wirt, Wirt probably doesn’t know much more about himself.

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

Chores are completed. Dinner is made and then eaten on the front porch, Anna delighting in the simple joy of company and this blissful break from the mundane. She and Greg do the dishes; Wirt wrangles all the animals and puts them to bed. 

Evening falls as gentle as a quilt tucking everybody in. Anna sits with the boys on the front stoop, all of them with their own mug of steaming liquid cupped in their hands. Wirt and Anna sip freshly brewed tea; Greg sports a warm milk mustache. Stars sprinkle the night sky. Insects play their reedy songs. It is peacefully, comfortably quiet, and Anna is only a little put off that Wirt sits as a chunk of nothingness that his little brother leans contentedly into. 

She bites her bottom lip, calling upon her courage. “Why do you wear both those talismans?” 

Greg pats the circle of finely woven vegetation and twine that hangs over his chest. A single tooth hangs from it like a pearl pendant. It had been hidden under his shirt when she’d first met him, but he’s never made a move to hide it when it loops out of his collar. “Oh, this old thing? My brother gave it to me! It’s an award, on account of I am the best little brother ever.” 

Wirt grunts noncommittally. Anna side-eyes him, not giving up. “I’ve never seen you take it off, Greg,” she observes lightly. “Is that not uncomfortable?”

“Pssh, nah. It actually makes me feel pretty warm n’ fuzzy, like a necklace-blanket. I think it’s made out of magic. That’s what the white deer told us. They’re kind of our best friends.”

“White… deer?” Anna repeats, forehead crinkling. “You met some albino deer in the woods, and they gave you necklaces?”

“Mmm, Wirt would probably explain it better. His award is even fancier.” Greg manages to find Wirt’s sleeve under all that blackness and tugs, forcing Wirt to transfer his mug of tea to his opposite hand so that he doesn’t spill its contents in his lap. “Tell her about the deer, Wirt! Tell her about how we had that adventure with the creepy crows and the weird circles in the woods and how you were all gross and sick and then the white deer came and helped us—” 

“Sounds like you’re telling her the whole thing, yourself,” Wirt chides him. His sunflower-hued irises sweep Anna’s confused features. “It’s… a long story. Don’t worry about it.”

“You’re both wearing teeth,” deadpans Anna. 

“Not _human_ teeth,” Greg informs her, as if that makes the talismans perfectly normal. He slurps his cinnamon-spiced milk. 

Ann rubs the ceramic of her cup, deciding to forge ahead. Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back, and since the monster-boy has shown her nothing but respect and _acted_ like nothing but a bashful teen she calculates the risk as minimal. “Forgive my inquisitiveness. You are perfect strangers seeking shelter for an indeterminate amount of time, wearing _teeth,_ and one of you—no offense, Wirt—resembles the very Beast that haunts the Unknown. You won’t even tell me _why_ you’re here.”

“We’re waiting!” pipes Greg. Wirt shrugs, looking away, and Anna pushes harder.

“Waiting for _what,_ though? Are you—are you _hiding_ from something? Something dangerous?”

She hasn’t felt fear since she caught Wirt with a trashy romance novel; now it chills the tea in her stomach. She shifts to face Greg and Wirt more fully, causing the boards of the stoop to creak under her. The boys are running, not passing through—she’s _certain._ How could she not have realized sooner, when Wirt is so horribly injured?! Whatever had harmed the poor creature so deeply must be an even _worse_ monster!

Staring into his tea, Wirt answers her with a calm voice that conceals everything else he must be feeling. “We’re not hiding. We aren’t in danger. I’m sorry that I can’t tell you more, but…” He sighs. When Greg yawns sleepily and pillows his head against the obsidian slope of Wirt’s shoulder, the branch-crowned boy mutters an affectionate sound.

“I want to trust you,” Anna admits. She finishes off her tea and hugs her knees to her chest. “You haven’t given me a single reason not to, except your tacitness about _everything._ Am I supposed to play hostess indefinitely and never expect any answers?”

“Why are you in this cabin all alone?” Wirt counters sharply. His onyx talons absently stroke Greg’s hair; the child’s eyes are barely open and he yawns again, bored of the older kids talking. “Are you waiting, too?”

“Tell me about the white deer,” Anna fences back. She mistakes her impatience for bravery. “What are _you_ doing all alone, out there in the Unknown? Did you come upon my property by chance, or were you looking for it? Who—who hurt you?”

Wirt growls at her, a warning. “Not in front of Greg.”

A devil that the baby goats cuddle up to would never lash out at her, would he? _Trust shy rabbits, fowl, and deer; if they gather—‘tis safer here._ “What are you, really? You look too much like The Beast to be a coincidence, but you’re obviously _not_ him—I’ve _met_ that Beast.”

“I _am_ The Beast,” Wirt states emphatically. “The one you saw… is no more. I took his place. Is that enough of an answer for you?”

Greg grumbles and adjusts himself against his sibling. Anna stares at him—at his occult “award,” at his relaxed, unassuming expression as he snuggles Wirt, at the guarding claws that fold over his shoulder—and wrestles a sudden ugly rush of jealousy. Even The Beast has family, and she has none.

“If you’re The Beast,” she sneers, unable to correct her tone, “then where’s your lantern?”

The centers of Wirt’s eyes flash white-hot. He sits motionlessly, not even breathing. Anna’s guts cramp—she breached the boundary, stepped outside the line of safety—and she tenses for the punishing slice of talons across her face.

But Wirt does not strike her. Seconds pass, and his eyes settle back into dull yellow flames. 

“That’s what I’m waiting for,” he whispers at last, and Anna knows better than to ask him what he means.


	6. 🙞Game's End🙜

On the sixth day, the Woodsman knows he’s run out of time. Savage briars spike the perimeter of his once familiar, beautiful homestead as if the forest itself has grown fangs, baring its teeth to keep him away; the overcast sky and an unseasonably glacial wind promises punishing rain; when he hacks his way through the path leading to the cabin’s porch, he trips over tortuous Edelwood roots that crawl like pythons over the ground… roots that grow and grow and grow toward a central point: a new Edelwood tree whose slender branches don’t quite reach the cabin’s roof.

Arms not yet devoured by bark reach for him desperately. A face still open to the air crumples in grief. Captured within the malevolent wood is his Anna. 

“Father,” she bawls, hysterical and afraid. “I… I m-missed you…”

The Woodsman cannot speak. His throat constricts. Tears overflow his tired eyes. That’s her… that’s his _daughter,_ alive all this time and alone in that house and he hadn’t known he hadn’t even gone back to _check_ on her—

A solid nightmare steps from behind the Edelwood, eyes blazing white as they appraise the shocked old man. It scratches its talons lightly over the bark that imprisons Anna and its unctuous chuckle makes the Woodsman feel as if a thousand filthy insects have skittered across his skin, chewing with their pincers as they crawl. 

“You took too long,” The Beast croons. Another Edelwood vine slithers languidly around Anna, pinning her arms, mummifying her until only her sobbing face is visible. The roots that twist around the foundation of her tree trace hungrily under the cracking dirt. “All these months and you could have been together… the Edelwood was already taking her when I arrived.”

“Don’t listen, F-father,” Anna weeps. Her tears shudder into each aching syllable. “He t-tricked me, I’m s-so sorry, I d-didn’t know, I w-w-waited for you—”

“I can undo this,” The Beast drawls, raising his voice to be heard over his disconsolate prey. “Give me my lantern, Woodsman. Trade it for your daughter’s life.”

The forest groans beneath a harsh squall that whips at the Woodsman’s jacket and robs the heat from his body. He has not moved his stare from Anna’s brown eyes, just like her mother’s, Anna’s perfect button nose, she said she _waited for him_ , he's wasted weeks on his own stubborn bitterness and on chopping wood to feed the fire, his blade has felled _human beings,_ oh God, Anna will never forgive him...

“You’re really going to let her die?!” demands The Beast. His seething black form stretches, mutates, spine hunching and limbs splayed like the legs of a hideous spider. “You would rather lose the one thing that matters to you, just so that I don’t _win?_ You’d kill your prec̠i̭o̼u̧s̙ ̱d͔aͅu̠gͅh̳t̢e͔r̭ ͅō͖u̥͘t̩̍ ̱̾o̘͋f̰̾ ͚͘š̤p̱̈́i̛̳t̪̚ē̫?!”

If the Woodsman surrenders the Dark Lantern, he’s handing The Beast his power—his autonomy, his freedom—but that’s _his Anna_ pleading with him, dying, _there_ but not for long, and the Woodsman grits his teeth so hard it hurts and he takes an involuntary step forward...

An Edelwood leaf unfurls next to Anna’s tearstained cheek, caressing. The Beast practically _purrs_ with self-satisfaction. “That’s it, Woodsman… give it to me, and she lives. Just like I promised.” He extends a clawed arm like a contorted branch... 

_Don’t believe his lies._ A warning spoken to every child raised in the Unknown. Sweat pours from the Woodsman’s brow and down his back. He already knows that The Beast will consume his beloved daughter the instant that his damned soul is returned. There will be no collateral left to stop him. Yet a diseased hope clings by a string to the Woodsman and he helplessly watches himself lifting the lantern from his side, because if there is even a _mote_ of a chance that Anna will be spared, the old man will never, _ever_ forgive himself for not taking it. 

Hatred boils at the back of the Woodsman’s throat. “I defeated your forerunner once before, Beast. I will hunt you down if you cross me… mark my words.”

The Beast answers in a gutteral snarl that reverberates through the Woodsman’s bones, through the root-churned soil and the waiting forest. His hulking darkness slinks closer, still reaching frantically for the cage of his spirit. “ _G̫̈́I̬̐V͇̿E̘̊ ̭I̲̅T͓͑ ̟͊T̗̓O͓̔ ̩M̻̕E̫͐ G̫̈́I̬̐V͇̿E̘̊ ̭I̲̅T͓͑ ̟͊T̗̓O͓̔ ̩M̻̕E̫͐ G̫̈́I̬̐V͇̿E̘̊ ̭I̲̅T͓͑ ̟͊T̗̓O͓̔ ̩M̻̕E̫͐—_ ”

Something shoots past the Woodsman’s ear and _thwacks_ The Beast between his scorching eyes. The Beast rears back, screeching loud enough to shake the woods and rattle the labyrinth of thorns, and rips his ravenous stare away from the Dark Lantern right as a young woman strides from the treeline. She’s already pulled another stone back in her slingshot, her trembling limbs riddled with shallow scratches from the ruthless briars. Not a trace of fear mars the fury of her freckled features. When The Beast splits ears with a murderous roar—light vanishing from the world, Edelwood writhing, animals crying out in terror—the girl shouts _back._

“Another tantrum? SERIOUSLY?!” She looses another projectile that hits The Beast dead-center in the chest. As the monster hisses, lurching backward, she prowls to stand boldly next to the Woodsman. The old man is too bewildered by her abrupt presence to stop her from tearing the Dark Lantern from his hand—and a wail of deep despairing agony unhinges his jaw when he realizes he no longer holds the single thing keeping his Anna alive.

“I need that, I am _begging you,_ you don’t know what you’re doing—”

The girl deftly steps from his vainly grabbing hands. With a careless flick she opens the lantern’s glass window to expose its colorful flickering flame.

The Woodsman stumbles to his knees. The Beast halts. They watch the dauntless redhead raise that vulnerable, depraved soul to the level of her jaw—an inch away from a breath that would extinguish it. 

“Let them go, Wirt,” Beatrice orders coldly, “or I’ll _kill you,_ and let them go myself.”

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus Tracks: “Lindyhop” by Alamo Race Track; "Ending" by Koethe
> 
> I know I’ve lost some folks, but I promise you, there are answers. I’m trying to hit that sweet spot between giving you puzzle pieces and accidentally solving the whole thing too soon by being too obvious. (Plus, jumping around the timeline is fun)
> 
> Things that will be explained/revealed next time ( ~~promise~~ ):  
> \- How Beatrice knew to get here  
> \- What Wirt and Greg have been up to before shacking up at Anna’s cabin  
> \- Where is Greg during that last bit??
> 
> And as for those 100 questions many of you still have after "A Murder" - never fear! We'll get to those, too! 
> 
> Thank you all for your patience and support! I swear I know what I’m doing.


End file.
